PHP Version 3

Table of Contents

Introduction

The PHP 3 documentation was removed from the PHP Manual and placed here for
historical purposes. An attempt was made to preserve all of the text although
it's highly likely that some is missing. The last PHP 3 release (3.0.18) was
made on October 20, 2000.

See the PHP Museum for downloads, and
also read the history for further
information about PHP 3.

Configuration Directives

Most directives are prepended with php3_ instead of php_. These differences
are not mentioned in this document.

Changed

FTP configure option changed from --with-ftp to --enable-ftp

The value of E_ALL is 63.

The asp_tags directive was added in PHP 3.0.4.

The E_* constants have no meaning in php3.ini, but numeric values do.

Removed

--with-imsp[=DIR] includes IMSP support (DIR is IMSP's include dir and libimsp.a dir).

--with-mod-dav=DIR includes DAV support through Apache's mod_dav, DIR is mod_dav's
installation directory (Apache module version only).

If the sybase.compatability_mode directive is on, this will cause
PHP to automatically assign types to results according to their Sybase
type, instead of treating them all as strings.

Changed Behaviour

Return values

unset() returns 1.

Multiple calls to setcookie() in the same script will be performed
in reverse order. And put the insert before the delete when trying
to delete one cookie before inserting another.

eval() does not return a value.

Function parameters

gettype() has a 'user function' return value.

htmlspecialchars() added the second parameter in PHP 3.0.17.

error_log()'s second parameter, message, goes through the debugger.

empty() considers "0" as non-empty, a value that for example may come from an HTML form.

Other

Variables are always assigned by value, as there are no references.

Using arrays within HTML forms is limited to single dimensional arrays.

When escaping characters in single quoted strings, an E_NOTICE level error is generated.

Objects lose their class association throughout the process of serialization and unserialization.

Functions must be defined before use. In other words, top to bottom.

Variable number of arguments are not supported.

Return may only be used within function blocks.

Miscellaneous

The PCRE modifier is not available.

is_uploaded_file() exists as of PHP 3.0.16.

BC Math is enabled by default, --disable-bcmath disables it.

The behaviour of register_globals is always on, because the directive does not exist.

The short_tags() function may be used to enable short tags (<?).

The CGI build has a 'make bench' tool for benchmarking the build. It will likely take
over 30 seconds to run so be sure to allow the appropriate time limit.

SAPI support is not available.

The HTTP PUT method is allowed for saving files, which are handled similarly to POST method
file saves. $PHP_PUT_FILENAME holds the location of the temporary file created, which
must be moved during the request else it will be deleted.